On Mon, Apr 07, 2014 at 09:25:29PM -0700, John Celio wrote: > Just to add my 2?: Windows XP is an incredibly old operating system by > today's standards. Yeah, Vista and Windows 8 were/are pretty awful, > but Windows 7 is great. You really don't need to fear upgrading to 7, > especially since you can install the XP virtual machine and run all > the old software you have for XP > (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/install-and-use-windows-xp-mode-in-windows-7).
Unfortunately, that's not a universal panacea. Windows XP mode only works on the Professional, Enterprise & Ultimate versions of Windows 7 - it does not work on the (cheaper) Home version. Not only that - it requires at least a half-way modern CPU in order to work (one with a specific hardware feature to support virtualisation). Any machine running Windows XP is pretty much guaranteed not to have what is needed; I believe my wife's Windows 7 box (which came with W7 professional) has an early enough i5 CPU chipset that it doesn't have support for the right kind of hardware virtualisation. That's somewhat ironic, because the reason we paid the extra to put W7 Pro on that box was that some of the software packages she was regularly using at that time (including Intuit QuickBooks) weren't yet certified on W7, so we wanted XP mode as a fallback strategy. Fortunately, we never needed it! This means anyone wanting to go that route is going to require new hardware as well as a more expensive version of the operating system. Sure, it's "only a few hundred dollars", and you'll have a much better system at the end of the process. But those few hundred dollars are going to put this option beyond the reach of quite a few people. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
